Play-to-Earn Platform Rainmaker Nabs $6.5M Seed Round

Another entrant is gunning for crypto gaming’s buzzy play-to-earn (P2E) battlefield – by becoming the battlefield.

Rainmaker Guild Ltd. on Thursday said it raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round that was anchored by Alameda Research, Animoca Brands and CoinFund as venture capital firms rush in to fund what they hope will be the next Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based video game that has been a hit.

Few have been able to replicate Axie’s success this year. Rainmaker Games is betting on becoming a central P2E gateway by wooing players, training them for the big time and then connecting them with guilds.

Seed investors are taking 4% of all RAIN tokens. That would give Rainmaker Games, which hasn’t launched yet, a market cap of around $162 million. Play-to-earn games such as Axie, which requires an expensive non-fungible token to access, can command multibillion-dollar market caps.

A flood of first-time players keeps raising the floor price of those NFTs, giving rise to “guilds” that buy the NFTs and share access with their users. Rainmaker started as a guild, according to CEO Will Deane. It’s now angling to be something closer to a talent agency and training gym.

“We’re gonna help you train and level up to get guild-verified or game-verified,” Deane said in a call. Lower-tier first-timers will start out doing tasks that “go through the motions” until they improve to a point where they can start playing to earn.

“If you score on the low percentile, then you get to go to our training center and level up. As you level up you become more appetizing to guilds and games,” he said. Strong gamers will climb into prime positions for guild recruitment.

Players will eventually be able to sell or loan their NFTs on a Rainmaker marketplace, according to the project’s profile on Polkastarter.